16 Ways To Market Your Startup With No Budget - Free Guide

Marketing your startup has to be constant and repeatable.

With managing employees and keeping customers happy, startups usually don't have the time to create and implement a marketing campaign strategy that drives brand engagement, generates leads, and elevates sales (You need this to succeed and grow).

In today's digital world, we're going to focus on the top digital marketing strategies that you can use to promote and effectively market your startup, SaaS or Small business.

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Manifest your marketing potential with the following;

1. Start a Clean Email Marketing List

Starting an email marketing list should be a top priority as a startup. You receive tons of emails from companies and brands, do the same and start building a list.

This companies used online promotions or forms on their website where they incentive you to sign up and receive offers.

Make sure to make your potential clients feel welcomed!

Email marketing can be a quick and effective way to drive targeted traffic to your business. This is effective because you're delivering targeted messages straight to your customers inbox, be it a mobile device or desktop.

Use powerful call to action strategies to keep them engage and hopefully click to your site.

2. Website User Experience 101

Small businesses and SaaS companies need to have their websites optimized for easy navigation, so you don't loose your potential customer. Think about the user navigating through your pages -

Do this pages represent the value they are searching for at this time?

How long does it take them to find a product or service and then purchase it or inquire about it?

Without a properly designed website you are not putting the user first, so you might not deserve their business. Remember, your website is your business and represents how you function.

3. Be An Industry Leader

How does your website design stack-up to the nearest competitor?

User experience is the important, but design can be the key to making new visitors stay and purchase your products or services. Keep your web design clean, and appear as an expert in your space. Even if you are a startup or small business it works to your advantage.

4. Use Social Media to Engage Potential Customers

Ask your social media followers questions, and then use feedback to put out a better product and improve your process. Don't post irrelevant content as this will only damage your reputation or slowly kill your brand due to overwhelming fatigue.

5. SEO Should Be a Top Priority

Search engine optimization should be the must important long term strategy for your brand. Google changes it's algorithm from time to time but this shouldn't stop you from building effective SEO strategies that stick.

It's important to adapt to changes and optimize your startup or small business website so you can maintain high organic rankings over time.

With content becoming very important, you need to make sure your content engages the reader and provides them with information they can find useful or helpful. Your content has to be great to rank well, so any thing will not cut it.

7. Use Pay Per Click Search Campaigns

Pay Per Click search, also known as PPC, can be an exciting strategy for a lot of startups and small business owners because there's a lot to learn and understand.

When you consider CPCs and CTRs to conversion rates and quality score, PPC can be confusing and frustrating all at once, but if you work with a specialist or hire an agency, it can work wonders for your business.

SEO can take months to accomplish, even years - to get to the top of Google, but with paid search, you can be on top of Page 1 within a couple of hours, this can also help elevate your rankings with brand awareness.

8. Editorial Calendar for Posting Content

Scheduling and publishing your content in a timely fashion is very important. Having an editorial calendar will keep your content posting organized in order and will assure that you're serving as the hub of information for your startup or small business.

Use tools like Keyword Spy to analyze the competition, collect data and use these information to benefit your startup website.

10. Use Video Marketing platforms (Youtube, Metacafe, Vimeo)

YouTube is the second-largest search network in the world and will stay that way for a very long time as long as google owns it.

You can learn new things every day and that's what you want your potential customers to see.

Video marketing can help you educate users better than you ever could through your blog content - and with Youtube as part of Google, video is also another signal that Google factors into its ranking algorithm for SEO.

Use video marketing for new product launches and walk-through, host your marketing video on your website and share it across your social channels for more exposure.

Vimeo and Metacafe also accept marketing videos and can host them on their sites for you to share.

11. List Your Business on Local Directories

Use online local business directories like Google Local and Bing/Yahoo Local to help locals find your business quickly. Make sure to optimize those listings with a quality business description, accurate hours, and address.

Link the directory to your website and you'll get top referral traffic to your business.

12. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics should be used on your website, if you are not tracking your visitors yet - go to www.google.com/analytics, and get an analytic tracking code to paste on your website today.

Google Analytics is good for tracking visitors and how they interact with your website, showing you data, including; website users come from, time stayed on your website, which pages they're visiting the most, and most importantly, if they're purchasing your products or services.

Take a look at this data at least once a week.

13. Website Mobile Optimization

Mobile is becoming more relevant on how people search for products and services. If your website isn't optimized for mobile devices, your traffic will be affected.

Having a website that is mobile friendly is not only important but a necessity if you are running a business, especially when you consider the fact that Google has publicly stated that not having a mobile optimized website will affect your SEO drastically.

14. Offer Product and Service Discounts

Make sharing discounts as part of your marketing. Potential customers love knowing that they're getting some sort of discount or introductory, also start small when testing and increase the discount percent over time for different campaigns.

Your offer discount should be promoted on your website, through social media, and via your email campaigns to get the word out.

15. Focus on Site Reviews and Ratings/SAAS Directories

Reviews and Ratings play a vital part in digital marketing. People love to read reviews and get other people's opinions, develop a strategy to push reviews from your past customers to present customers as to build trust and loyalty.

You can use a personal email from the founder of the business or an incentive for leaving a positive review on platforms like Facebook, Google+, and Yelp, don't ignore this aspect - Positive reviews and high ratings need to find their way into your marketing strategy today.

Saas Directories: If your startup is a Software as a service, you can use powerful SaaS directories to get reviews and ratings for your startup. Getting reviews from early adopters can be a way to gain new customers and build traction towards your software solution.

16. Listen to Your Customers Questions and Requests

This might Sound like a no hassle, right?

Well, yes, but you have to remember to do it on effectively. Customers can give you a different perspective, and they often have great feedback for startup and small business owners on what they can do to improve.

Listen but don't take every advise. Make sure you're monitoring the comments on your social media profiles and have a section of your website where visitors can email you comments/feedback.

Keep practicing and you will find yourself taking on good business habit that will go a long way for your customer service efforts.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is vital to your business being a business! Without any marketing strategy in place, you can have a somewhat good business, but the vast majority of potential customers aren't going to know about it.

We have covered some of the current digital marketing strategies that startups and small businesses are utilizing to increase brand awareness and boost their customer base.